Seven Sisters, emblems of Soviet grandeur, light up Moscow skyline

Built by Stalin as emblems of victory and symbols of a new era, the seven colossal skyscrapers still stand out amid new high-rises.

From time to time, the Soviet man, raised
in the spirit of atheism, needed messages from on high. Fortunately, he had the
inspirational Pioneer camp Artek in the Crimea, the Exhibition of Economic
Achievements in Moscow,
and the famous Moscow Metro — heralds of the communist paradise on earth, which
would arrive one fine day, despite all the burdens of grey socialist work days.
Soon after the end of World War II, in defiance of all doubters, a grandiose
new architectural project was launched. Joseph Stalin, “the father and friend
of all Soviet architects” as he was called at their All-Union Congress in 1946,
embarked on a colossal construction project designed to convince the Soviet
people and the whole world of the victorious Soviet power’s increased
self-awareness.

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In early 1947, the Council of Ministers
adopted a resolution for the construction of seven “skyscrapers”. On September
7, that same year, during the celebration of Moscow’s 800th anniversary, at exactly 1:00
pm, the first stone was laid in a special ceremony.

The first Moscow skyscraper was completed in 1949,
followed every three-five years by another (all but one of the remaining six).
Later known as the “seven sisters”, these buildings became famous as monuments
of “Stalinist-Gothic” and the defining symbols of Moscow: Moscow State
University (240 m.)
on Sparrow Hills remained the tallest building in Europe until completion of
the Exhibition Center at Frankfurt-on-Main in 1990; the Foreign Ministry; the
Ministry of Transportation; two residential buildings; the Hotel Ukraine; and
the youngest of the sisters, the Hotel Leningrad (135 m.). In the post-war
period, these symbols of a new era, glowing with magnificence, seemed like
fantastic emblems of triumph and beacons of a resurgent country proclaiming its
greatness to the world. “We can!” That was their architectural slogan,
trumpeted from a country that lay in ruins, a country faint from hunger, a
country most of whose residents still had to live in cramped communal
apartments.

The supervision of the skyscrapers’
construction was initially entrusted to the notorious KGB chief Lavrenty
Beria
(who would be executed in 1953). Beria was also in-charge of creating a
Soviet
atomic bomb. Thousands of prisoners from the Gulag and German prisoners
of war
helped in constructing these towering high-rises. A different technique
was
used for every building to stabilise the ground under the foundation.
The costs
didn’t matter. Around 2.6 billion Soviet rubles were spent on Moscow
State
University alone. At
current exchange rates, it would amount to around $650 million, more
than two
billion rubles set aside to rebuild the war-ravaged Stalingrad
from 1946 to 1950. Roughly the same amount was spent on the construction
of the
other six “sisters”.

206 meters is the height of the Ukraina hotel, including the 73-meter-long spire. The total area building is more than 88 thousand square meters.

These monumental skyscrapers built in the
style of neoclassicism surround the center of the city like a fortress wall.
All were built according to one stylistic conception: a dominating central
tower which, like an Aztec pyramid, narrows in stair-like stages to the top,
and is flanked, in a more or less strict order, by wings. The plan of the
buildings may vary, as may the lavish decorations of the towers, the statues
and bas-reliefs. Each skyscraper represents a set of architectural quotations
and borrowings from various styles and tendencies, from the Renaissance and
baroque to Russian church architecture. Clearly, Stalin’s tastes, known for his
preference for Gothic, loomed large in the minds of architects. They didn’t
always manage to please him: the Foreign Ministry was not originally designed
with a spire, but the dictator insisted. So as not to violate the building’s
statics, a special light-weight construction had to be perched on top with
supports descending five floors made the same color as the skyscraper. After
Stalin’s death in 1953, the architects asked the new General Secretary, Nikita
Khrushchev, for permission to undo this Stalinist act of despotism. But
Khrushchev refused. He wanted the spire on the Foreign Ministry to remain as a
“monument to Stalin’s stupidity”.

1200 paintings hung on the walls of the corridors, halls and rooms. The most famous are by Vasily Polenov and Alexan- der Deineka.

Contemporaries were immediately struck by
the resemblance of these Stalinist-Gothic monuments to certain American
precursors, such as the Manhattan
Municipal Building
completed in 1914. Given this resemblance, it was hard to make the necessary
ideological case. A dialectical explanation was required here: capitalist
temples of trade were studied in detail and used as a foundation, the object
being to give them a completely new meaning. The shape of the Municipal Building
in New York City
was determined by the high price of land; this in turn deprived many of the
apartments of natural daylight since they face a dark inner courtyard. Needless
to say, the Soviet man, standing at the head of all city-planning projects,
deserved better.

Stalin’s death marked an end to the
principle that “the eye should delight” as quickly as the “father and friend of
all architects” had disposed of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1930s. Khrushchev
declared war on Stalinist extremes in city planning. Now everything would be
sacrificed to functional understatement. Rapid construction of mass housing had
begun, leading to many city dwellers getting separate apartments for the first
time in their lives. In the Russian mind, however, Stalinist skyscrapers still
equal quality, while Khrushchev’s matchbox-size apartments equal quantity.

The construction of the Stalinist-Gothic
skyscrapers was completed under Khrushchev. But the most impressive skyscraper
of all (number eight), which was supposed to be located next to Red Square and
soar up to 275 meters,
was buried. Instead, on the foundation of this would-be administrative
building, the Rossiya was built, the largest hotel in Europe.
Fate was not kind either to the classical model of “Stalinist Empire”
architecture: the Palace of the Soviets. The construction of this 420-m tower
to be crowned with a 100-m statue of Lenin was suspended during the war. When
Khrushchev learned how much it would cost to complete the construction, he
supposedly said: “Better build chemical combines instead.” In place of the
Palace, an enormous outdoor heated swimming pool was built. In the 1990s, the
pool was replaced by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. (The original
cathedral had been pulled down by Stalin in 1931.)

Today, the “seven sisters” have somewhat
lost their old lustre. In the two residential buildings the elevator breaks
from time to time while the residents, members of the intelligentsia in the
first case, pilots and cosmonauts in the second, must make their peace with the
fact that their new neighbors are hardly high society. The central building at Moscow State
University with its
marble staircases and rich interior furnishings and special aura remains very
grand, but many of the rooms in the dormitory badly need repair.